Phenomenology as science of pure consciousness

pp. 213-237

in: Edmund Husserl, Introduction to logic and theory of knowledge, Berlin, Springer, 2008

Abstract

As a result of our meditations, upon close inspection, a new field of possible scientific research has opened up to us, a new, phenomenological objectivity, a new science, therefore, phenomenology. 217 So far, we have been exclusively guided by epistemological interests and, if the critical problems were to be solved, this called for the elimination of all natural objectifications, of all empirical judgments, therefore, for the phenomenological reduction. After we have reached phenomenological ground, however, we readily see that a distinctive kind of theoretical interest can be directed toward everything that is to be explored here, an interest that does not seek to acquire and treat phenomenological knowledge simply in the service of problems of critique of knowledge. We can say: No theory of knowledge without phenomenology. But phenomenology also retains meaning independently of theory of knowledge, i.e., independently of the interest in clearing up those remarkable errors and confusions in which reflection about natural knowledge becomes entangled.In the realm of theoretical reason, skepticism as concerns the developed sciences is never so sweeping that knowledge's and science's legitimate claim to objectivity would be seriously contested. But, the meaning of this objectivity is in question and the confusions on this point result in the falsification of this objectivity and, for example, in perceiving it absurdly as universally human or just biological, adapted to the intellectual state of the development of humanity.